Читать книгу County and Town in England Together with some Annals of Churnside - Allen Grant - Страница 15

No county in England has so much history of its own as Somerset. Perhaps the reason may be found in its complete want of natural boundaries. East Anglia and Sussex, like Spain and Italy, stand off as real physical individualities, which survive and subsist in spite of all ethnographical or political changes; but Somerset rather resembles the Low Countries and the Slavonian marches in being the natural battle-ground of hostile races and languages. For some centuries, the irregular bit of country between the Avon and the Exe formed the debateable border disputed by the English of Wessex and the Damnonian Welsh of Devon and Cornwall; and when at last the county assumed its present shape as an English shire, it would have been impossible to describe its limits except in the meaningless geographical fashion as bounded on the east by Wilts, on the south by Dorset, and on the west by Devon. It shares the valley of the Avon with Wilts and Gloucester, the valley of the Parrett with Dorset, and the valley of the Axe with Devonshire; while its part of Exmoor, of the Black Downs, and of the Exe basin is cut off across country by a purely arbitrary line running at right angles to the hill-ranges and river-courses. Such an artificial division as this must clearly have been created by history, instead of creating history for itself.

Of Celtic Somerset we know very little. It seems to have been mainly included in the territory of the Damnonians; but since the greater part of the region then consisted of undrained fens and marshes—“moors,” as local phraseology still has it—there was little chance of its filling any large place in early annals. Only the vale of Avon, on its eastern border, afforded any favourable area for primitive agriculture; and there the hill-forts of the early inhabitants still cluster thickly above the rich lowlands at Caer Badon, Little Solisbury, Lansdown, Stantonbury, Maes Knoll, and many other isolated heights. Hither, in case of hostile invasion from the men of Dorset or of Gloucester, the Caer Badon people carried up their women and children, their sheep and cattle, and their household goods. The rest of the shire was almost wholly occupied by the unbroken forest of Selwood, the bare uplands of Mendip and Exmoor, and the immense marshy wastes around the sources of the Axe, the Parrett, and the Yeo. When the Romans came, Somerset fell into their hands with the first conquest of South Britain; and the dale of Avon remained the most important part of the shire as it now stands. The hot springs at Bath made the Romans fix their most fashionable station in the valley below Caer Badon; and to this new city they gave the name of Aquæ Sulis from the neighbouring hill-fort of [Sul] now Little Solisbury. From Bath, through the very heart of the marshland, they drove their great road, the Foss Way, to Exeter and onward, so as to connect the outlying and doubtfully loyal peninsula of Devon and Cornwall with their main strategic centre at Cirencester. But the relics of their occupation remain most thickly only in the immediate vale of Avon, or along the line of the Foss itself; the wild marshy and hilly country behind probably received little attention from soldiers and administrators who regarded Britain chiefly as a feeder of the empire, and so confined their interests to its corn-growing portions. The rich oolitic dale round Aquæ Sulis doubtless stood out like a little oasis or island of Roman civilisation and agriculture, girt round on every side by forest, fen, or down, the wild hiding-places of half-tamed Celts.

When the Romans went away, Bath had its own petty British King, whose dominions were perhaps confined to the Avon valley; while other Romanised princes ruled independently at Gloucester and Cirencester—the Glevum and Corinium of the Italian settlers. For a while the English conquerors of the east and south coasts left the British kinglets of the western watershed unmolested in their little territories. But after the subjugation of Wilts and Dorset, the West Saxons began to turn towards the basins of the Atlantic slope. Near the close of the sixth century, about a hundred and thirty years after the first landing of the English in Britain, Cuthwine and Ceawlin, princes of the West Saxons, “fought against the Welsh,” says the English Chronicle, “and slew three Kings, Conmail and Condidan and Farinmail, at the place cleped Dyrham, and took three chesters from them, Gloucester, and Cirencester, and Bath.” In the general history of England this victory at Dyrham Park on the Cotswolds has an immense strategical importance, from the fact that it cut in two the British resistance, dividing the unconquered territory into Wales proper on the north and West Wales (that is, Devon and Cornwall) on the south; so that henceforth the West Saxons were able to advance steadily step by step against the Damnonian Welsh, whom they drove to the Axe, to the Parrett, to the Exe, to the Tamar, and at last to the sea; until in the end all Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall became swallowed up in Wessex, without fear of interference from the Welsh proper on the north, who had themselves similarly to retreat before the steady onward advance of English Mercia. But as regards the restricted history of Somerset, the interest of the Battle of Dyrham lies in the fact that then for the first time did Englishmen begin to settle within the limits of the modern shire. As usual, the heathen invaders seized first on the richest and most agricultural portion of the district, the old Romanised lowlands around Bath. This little corner, the nucleus of modern Somerset, extended only from the Avon to the Axe. The English overlords who settled down among the deserted Roman villa homesteads, in the place of the Kings of Bath, called themselves the Sumorsæte—a word which is obviously analogous to Dorsæte and Defnsæte, though the meaning of the first element in the name possibly cannot now be recovered. Perhaps it was the old local Celtic title for the people of the valley; in which case the word would designate the English overlords as “settlers among the Sumor tribe.” Ethnographical researches leave very little doubt that the Romanised British people even of this earliest Somerset must have been largely spared as slaves by the Teutonic conquerors.

For many years the English continued to own the Avon dale, while the Welsh still held out for their Damnonian princes in the downs and marshes between the Axe and the Devonshire border. As Mr. Freeman puts it, Wells was then in Welshland, while Wookey, a mile or two off, was in England. The Wansdyke, or Woden’s dyke, marks the boundary between the two powers. Moreover, as Dr. Guest has shown, a long spur or wedge of Welsh territory also ran north-eastward along Frome and Avon into the English dominions, back of Bath, as far as Malmesbury—Braden and Selwood Forests forming the mark or border of waste between the two races. Gradually, however, the intrusive Teuton pushed his way westward, subduing or cutting off the conquered Welsh. Three-quarters of a century after the capture of Bath the West Saxons advanced to Bradford-on-Avon, thus no doubt completing the conquest of the backward Welsh spur. A few years later a battle was fought at Pen Selwood, in which the Welsh were driven westward as far as the Parrett, so that all Selwood and the marshland fell into the hands of the English. The valley of the Tone was more slowly overrun; and at last, about the beginning of the eighth century, a hundred and twenty years after the capture of Bath and more than two hundred after the landing of the West Saxons in Britain, the English had pushed their frontier as far as the Exe—in other words, had taken all Somerset. But these later conquests were doubtless, as Mr. Freeman suggests, far less cruel than the earlier ones. In the interval between the capture of Bath and the battle at Bradford-on-Avon the West Saxons had been converted to Christianity, and the struggle was no longer one of creed and race, but simply of race alone. In the earlier wars the Christian Briton seems to have been enslaved and Teutonised by his heathen master; in the later wars he was allowed to retain possession of his land as a rent-paying churl, and for some generations he apparently kept up the use of the Welsh, or Cornish language, much as is the case with the people of Wales, Ireland, and the Scotch Highlands at the present day. In the laws of Ini the West Saxon, the conqueror of Taunton, the Welsh churl has a recognised place, and his life has its fixed price, though not so high as that of the English churl. Even the religious houses seem to have kept up a continuous existence from Welsh into English times. The Damnonian Kings (whose names and reigns Dr. Guest has traced, perhaps with more ingenuity than conclusiveness) had their Westminster Abbey at Glastonbury, a solitary tor which then rose like an island in the midst of the marshes of the Brue. Its Welsh name, preserved for us by William of Malmesbury, was Ynys Witrin, the Isle of Magic[?]; and it was the reputed burial-place of Arthur, the Island of Avilion made familiar to us by Mr. Tennyson. Ini re-endowed this old Welsh sanctuary; and even after the Norman Conquest William of Malmesbury still saw there the monuments of the early British abbots. Such continuity with the British and Roman times meets us nowhere else in English history. The Somerset people, half English, half Teutonised Celts, had their own ealdorman to a late period; and they still have their own Bishop at Bath and Wells. It is more important to note, however, that the traditions of Roman days survived strongly in the county for ages after the English conquest. Edgar, first King of all England, was crowned at Bath; the Anglo-Saxon princes were buried beside their British predecessors at Glastonbury; and when Swegen the Dane failed to get himself crowned at London he went to Bath, where he received the submission of the ealdorman of Devon and thanes of the West, “and then all folk held him for full King.”